Posts tagged with 'beta'

When you want to assign a bug to someone, subscribe them to a blueprint and so on, you see Launchpad’s person picker. It’s where you search for someone or a team, get a list of possible matches and then select the right one.

Fairly recently, we’ve made a couple of improvements to the person picker, such as adding the person/team’s unique Launchpad ID after their display name, so you stand a better chance of choosing the right person.

The trouble is, how many of us know the Launchpad ID of each person or team we’re likely to deal with?

I know I think more in terms of someone’s IRC nick or the various associations they might have, rather than what they chose as their Launchpad ID.

That’s why we’re changing the person picker: soon, everyone will get a new version of the person picker that shows you what I think is a much more useful set of information in helping find the right person.

Over the past few months, my team have been working to make it easier to create and manage derivative distributions in Launchpad.

Although most of this will be of interest only to distro admins and contributors, we recently released a beta of a new feature that lets you visualize the differences between Ubuntu’s Oneiric series and Debian Sid.

There’s a new portlet on the distroseries page that will list the numbers of packages in both distributions, numbers only in Sid and numbers only in Oneiric. Clicking on the links takes you to pages that show the differences in more detail and allows you to request debdiffs and add comments on the packages.

Please let me know what you think of this change. We’re tracking bugs using the ‘derivation’ bug tag. Note that this is not meant to be a replacement for MoM – yet. We have a long way to go for that.

Ever wished you got less bug mail? Or perhaps that you could better control the bug mail that Launchpad sends you?

Recently, Gary and the yellow squad, plus before them the previous Launchpad bugs team, have been working to give you just that: better control of the email that Launchpad sends you about bugs.

The yellow squad are spending the next couple of weeks adding some additional polish to the new bug subscriptions and notifications system. If you’re part of the Launchpad beta testers team, though, you’ve got access to it right now.

So, if you are a Launchpad beta tester, here’s what to look out for when dealing with bug subscriptions:

You can now choose which events will trigger an email and filter them by types of status, importance, etc., when you subscribe to a series, project or distribution.

As a result, you can have more than one bug subscription to the same series, project or distribution, each subscription with its own name.

You can mute individual bugs.

Bug mail that results from a named subscription has a “X-Launchpad-Subscription” header, and a line in the body of the email, quoting the name you gave the subscription.

You can see, and edit, all the different ways in which you might receive email about a particular bug by clicking “Edit bug mail” on a bug page.

I’ll announce the feature properly, with a nice fancy screencast and all that jazz, when we release it in full.

If you’ve got any questions, come join us on the launchpad-users list. If you come across any bugs, please report them with the “story-better-bug-notification” and “beta-team” tags.